There are echo chambers and then there are right-wing echo chambers.
If you go down the rabbit hole of right-wing media, you’d think it was inevitable that Spencer Pratt would become the mayor of Los Angeles and the only reason he came in third was election fraud.
It doesn’t occur to right-wingers that Los Angeles is a city to the left of Los Angeles County, which in turn is further to the left of California, which is further to the left of the rest of the country. They just can’t wrap their heads around how a setup like that is really bad for someone trying to run a Trump-backed right-wing campaign.
Besides a couple of council districts, it’s probably as hard to pull off a right-wing campaign in the city of Los Angeles as it is to pull off a progressive campaign in a statewide race in Mississippi. It’s just not going to happen absent remarkable circumstances. It took Alabama voters multiple allegations of sexual misconduct involving minors against Republican Roy Moore to narrowly elect (50% to 48.3%, with 1.7% going to write-ins) Democrat Doug Jones as a senator. That’s how intense partisanship works.
As of this writing, Pratt’s 25% is underperforming what Trump did two years ago. Going into a general election against either Mayor Karen Bass or Councilmember Nithya Raman, it seems highly unlikely he’d get the staunchly Democratic votes of the 34.30% who voted for Bass or the 29% for the democratic socialist Raman.
No matter how you slice it, Pratt alone didn’t represent some grand backlash to the Los Angeles establishment.
Pratt and Raman combined certainly do. Lost in all of the noise about election fraud is that two-thirds of Angelenos voted against Mayor Karen Bass, with Pratt’s 25% following Raman’s 29%. The center-left Adam Miller received 3.5% of the vote and the far-left Rae Huang received 3% of the vote. The significance of this vast transpartisan front against Bass is probably lost on the many X-addicted right-wingers and grifters reposting conspiracy theories.
My humble suggestion to right-wingers is to log off X, stop following grifters and stop trying to find salvation in figures like Spencer Pratt.
Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com